ABSTRACT

Possibly one of the most remarkable changes in the twentieth century, with a direct impact on public health, was the emergence of a new form of society based on apparently plentiful forms of energy. This has altered the role of the human body by literally replacing human and other animal energy with fossil fuel energy. This produces a pathway of physiological metabolic effects. In this chapter we explore the features and implications of this astonishing transition. It has led to a normalisation of a particular type of economy and way of living which by the late twentieth century had become almost entirely dependent on non-renewable energy. As has been written, ‘[w]ithout modern energy systems, society as we know it today would cease to exist’. 1 The far-seeing social philosopher George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), speaking to his students at Chicago University in 1909 on the revolutionary implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, observed that ‘the conception of Energy’ and its connection with ‘the economic history of Europe’ gave it an importance ‘which places it on a par with that of evolution’. 2